Last night I actually had a few free hours to work on this last song and bring the drums up to standard. I blew off studying for my Microsoft test again – gad, the last thing in the world I want to do is study for this thing………again………………anyway…..
Yesterday morning, I woke up super early and had about 15 minutes that I could use to work on the drums in this song. As usual for me I fired up Battery and dumped a standard drum kit in there.
Also as per usual I started looking around in my midi drum files for something to base a beat on. Not that I am trying to sound like a commercial, but it seems more and more that I am using the GrooveMonkee midi files. I have lots of other drum midis, but for some reason the GM things just seem to be easy to find a groove that fits without searching forever, and when you don’t have a lot of time, every minute that you save is worth a lot.
I was really lucky that morning, as I found something within a few minutes that would serve just fine as the basis of groove that would work fine with what I already had from my drum machines. Many times the hard part comes with matching the existing groove exactly, so I spent a bit of time there.
This song does have a bridge section, and again I was able to find a couple of midis that worked well here also – hooray GrooveMonkee! And I should mention that even though I own a lot of the GM files, these particular ones (from the electronic set) I just downloaded for free from the site – doesn’t get much easier than that.
At that point I had to stop, since this getting to work thing was getting in the way.
I would like to digress here a bit and talk about loops as opposed to midi files. I used to use drum loops all the time, and I think I did some pretty creative things with them. Certainly with all the tools you have now, in the right hands drum loops are great.
For me however I find that using midi files just gives me a great deal more flexibility, since I am not stuck with the exact sounds from the loop, I can change individual drums in battery, or kits, with no work at all, and I can apply the effects after recording, and you know I am into effects. That way, once its recorded as audio, I can still do whatever I like on the audio side, just as if they were loops to begin with – but now I feel they sound like me.
So last night I was able to jump right back in and get to work. The method:
Start with making the midi files groove clips, extend them and make sure they line up with the existing material correctly. I think that this is maybe the most important first step. I am not a drummer, but I can really hear when the groove missteps, and it drives me crazy.
The next step is to start adding fills, flams, start swapping the drum hits around. I like to have at least a couple of different bass drums and snare sounds to play with. I use a combination of playing the parts in live on the keyboard and doing granular editing of the notes by hand in the sequencer. And I always try to think like a drummer (and I will pointedly not put any drummer jokes in here!). I want it to feel like a human is playing it, including the dynamics and all that.
Then I work on the exact drum sounds. In many cases, the Battery kits are so good, I won’t have to swap any sounds. In this case, the song is slow and after listening to lots of kits, found one that had a snare and kick that I liked. Funny, they are very dark and thud like, on this song, not a bright and amped up like I normally go for.
I did, after some messing around, replace a few of the cymbal sounds and change the notes they were playing on. After that, it was more of the same – close my eyes, listen to the beat (with just the bass and vocal) and keep adding and subtracting and moving things around. Its not like it’s a science, but I know when I have found what I am looking for.
After a few hours, I had the drums tamed! As it turned out, I opted to dump all the normal sounding drums from the DX200, although I kept the interesting percussion noises. In the same fashion, I dropped out a lot the ER1 drums, except again for the interesting electro noises. This gives the drum tracks a feel that is somewhere between acoustic and electronic, which is what I was after.
Now that I had the groove down, I was able to split the Battery drum tracks into their component drum sounds, keeping the like sounds (meaning both kicks for instance) on one track. Being a soft synth, dumping the sounds to tracks is easy.
And that’s when I ran out of time. All that needs to be done now is rerecord all the hardware synths to audio and mix.
A pretty good nights work, all in all.